Walking, in all honesty, is a good time to clear the mind. Just walking, with no destination, focusing just on your thoughts and just moving, watching your feet move forwards, listening to your breathing. It's a form of meditation I've enjoyed since adolescence.
I was eight years old when my father left my mother and I. Even though he hit my mother and yelled until his face turned red as a tomato, he was the backbone of the misshapen family we were. I know my parents weren't married and that the only reason they'd been together so long was because of me, an "accident" according to my mother. A mistake. My mother was happier after he left, and we were well off by ourselves for about a year and a half, until the money my mother was paid at her job wasn't enough to pay the bills here and there. Stress began to give her little crescent shaped bags under her eyes and she soon plucked out the gray hairs from her head, and since lost her job a week before my tenth birthday. She did some odd jobs here and there, and she didn't tell me much about her job at the time which consisted of men coming into the house in the night and leaving hours after. (Looking back, I realize she'd probably turned to prostitution.) She drank alcohol a lot and yelled just like my father had did, and I was unhappy.
You see, I had to kill her. I couldn't keep living there with her, and she wouldn't have left me leave.
I was thirteen years old when I did it. I'd planned it out over a scale of six months. I had escaped to America by the time I was fifteen, and lived out in the Midwest under the guise of being an eighteen-year-old Japanese immigrant named Aiko Ito who spoke only Japanese and a few key English phrases (the most basic). A year later, I found out about a "hiking trip" that turned out to be Johnny Apple's trick to get me and others in the Underground.
I missed my mother in some ways, but I only missed the old her -- post-father, pre-unemployment, the carefree stereotypical Japanese mother that made me little obentou^ for school and told me stories and promised to take me to Japan one day so I could see where she grew up. I'd always wanted to go to Japan.
But I never did. >> (1) Obentou is the polite form of "bentou" (commonly misspelled "bento"). It is a Japanese lunch box.
Megumi Kurosawa -- Day Ten
Walking, in all honesty, is a good time to clear the mind. Just walking, with no destination, focusing just on your thoughts and just moving, watching your feet move forwards, listening to your breathing. It's a form of meditation I've enjoyed since adolescence.
I was eight years old when my father left my mother and I. Even though he hit my mother and yelled until his face turned red as a tomato, he was the backbone of the misshapen family we were. I know my parents weren't married and that the only reason they'd been together so long was because of me, an "accident" according to my mother. A mistake. My mother was happier after he left, and we were well off by ourselves for about a year and a half, until the money my mother was paid at her job wasn't enough to pay the bills here and there. Stress began to give her little crescent shaped bags under her eyes and she soon plucked out the gray hairs from her head, and since lost her job a week before my tenth birthday. She did some odd jobs here and there, and she didn't tell me much about her job at the time which consisted of men coming into the house in the night and leaving hours after. (Looking back, I realize she'd probably turned to prostitution.) She drank alcohol a lot and yelled just like my father had did, and I was unhappy.
You see, I had to kill her. I couldn't keep living there with her, and she wouldn't have left me leave.
I was thirteen years old when I did it. I'd planned it out over a scale of six months. I had escaped to America by the time I was fifteen, and lived out in the Midwest under the guise of being an eighteen-year-old Japanese immigrant named Aiko Ito who spoke only Japanese and a few key English phrases (the most basic). A year later, I found out about a "hiking trip" that turned out to be Johnny Apple's trick to get me and others in the Underground.
I missed my mother in some ways, but I only missed the old her -- post-father, pre-unemployment, the carefree stereotypical Japanese mother that made me little obentou^ for school and told me stories and promised to take me to Japan one day so I could see where she grew up. I'd always wanted to go to Japan.
But I never did.
>> (1) Obentou is the polite form of "bentou" (commonly misspelled "bento"). It is a Japanese lunch box.